KirstenBarta

October 10, 2014

To cap off our celebration of Customer Service Week, I want to introduce you to Ryan Villanueva.

Ryan is a Level 2 Support Engineer. He’s in charge of assisting customers with more complex technical issues, or with back-end issues that our Level 1 technical team might not have experience with. He also guides and trains our Level 1 technical team to help give them better tools for supporting customer calls.

Ryan is the first winner of Intermedia’s new Worry-Free Recognition Program. We created this program to recognize and reward employees who go above and beyond to ensure that our customers receive a truly worry-free experience.

I sat down with Ryan earlier this week to hear what he loves most about his job:

“Honestly, I think it’s talking to all the different level 1 technical engineers and customers. When I was a level 1 support technician, I was the first point of contact for our customers. You really get a broad overview and get to interact with a lot of different sectors of the business world. You learn how they are implementing cloud services. You get people that are very seasoned at it and other who are less experienced. There’s just a huge spectrum of customers, and its fun to talk to them.”

Ryan also shared with me a particularly tough and ultimately successful customer service story:

“We had a customer with a strict deadline for moving their toll-free number from their previous carrier to us. It was really urgent because their provider was closing their account. They would be dead in the water after that. I think we had a day and a half to do the work, which typically takes about two to four weeks. So I spent hours and hours just touching base with every single person that I could find trying to get these numbers moved over.

“I remember just wondering if I was going to be able to even do this. Would it even be possible? But I did get done in time—a few hours early, in fact. I had to call a lot of people. I had to escalate tickets throughout the different carriers up to the person who could help pull it off. It took a full day of just nonstop back and forth calling between the two vendors until they got all the information they needed. And then we moved the number over and tested it. I was really proud and happy that we made it happen for the customer.”

Ryan philosophy on great customer service shows why he’s our winner:

“Anything I can do that’s within the scope of our support, I will do. I relate my support with the customer to previous experiences I’ve had calling other vendors and make sure I don’t do the things those other vendors did to me that I didn’t like.

“For instance, a customer calls me and they have questions about changing their DNS records, which is pretty common for a small business. They’re not really that familiar with DNS because they may change their records once or twice in the time they own that domain name. I like to offer to call their provider. Or if they’re having issues with their Internet provider, I’ll call the provider with them on the phone.

“I think it helps the customer, because even though the issue is not with us, we still help them contact the people they do need to speak with and be their liaison for the problem. So if the vendor you’re calling has some questions maybe the customer doesn’t understand or a little more complex than they’re used to, we can jump in and help them.

“Usually with customer service at other companies it’s, ‘Oh, this is not our problem. Call so-and-so, they’ll fix it.’ Then you call that vendor and they point you back to the first place. So, I think it’s nice that Intermedia’s philosophy lets us help the customer by preventing that back and forth. The customer will really appreciate that as well, because it saves them the worry of ‘How am I going to talk to so-and-so about this? I don’t even know what it is.’

“That’s my idea of great support. Doing everything we can do to help our customer fix the problem, even though it may not even be our problem to begin with. We want it to get every problem resolved because overall we want the customers to say, ‘This is great support.’ I live by that.”